The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  “Third: Many of the parts a car factory needed were fragile. And fragile in different ways, too. You had to learn all kinds of proper handling techniques, or the part might be ruined. There’s no way you can accidentally damage the parts nanotech employs.

  “Fourth: None of the parts factories used were absolutely identical. Despite your best efforts, individual variations existed, and in the assembly process those variations had to be compensated for. Otherwise, the car might not work properly. But according to the immutable laws of physics, one hydrogen atom is absolutely identical to every other hydrogen atom and can be treated in exactly the same way.” Now I could see Ben’s eyes glazing over, but I was almost finished, so on I went.

  “Fifth: Nanotech can manipulate matter without ever leaving the digital domain, which has obvious advantages. You might have to deal with a rod 285 atoms long, or one 286 atoms long, but you never have to worry about a rod 285.456734 atoms long.

  “And finally,” I thought I heard Ben breathe a sigh of relief as I continued, “sixth: In your automobiles, most of the parts interacted in complex ways with the other parts. But nanotech is more like building with Lego blocks. You can build structures of any complexity, yet there are only a few different types of blocks, and they interact with other blocks in only a few different ways. It’s easy to develop an algorithm to examine any Lego object and then build a duplicate. It was much harder to do the same with a car.”

  While this whole business of molecular repair had seemed impossible just a few decades earlier, even as I explained it to my great-grandfather I was considering humankind’s next steps:

  Atoms and molecules are small, I reminded myself, but compared to subatomic particles, they’re gigantic. The nucleus comprises less than one-quadrillionth of an atom’s volume, and a thousand electrons have less mass than the smallest atomic nucleus. And quarks are even tinier than electrons. Yet someday—eons, millennia, or perhaps mere centuries from today—scientists and AIs might discover how to manipulate individual electrons, photons, gravitons, and quarks. The molecular manipulations we performed were simple by comparison; the difference between going to the moon and traveling to another galaxy. And the implications—nearly total control of matter, energy, perhaps the very laws of physics throughout the universe—staggered the mind.

  Ben had listened politely as I droned on about nanotech, and by now he was developing an idea of where he was and how he’d gotten here. Nonetheless, confusion dominated his thoughts. We still hadn’t told him how long he’d been gone, or what life was like now, or what society would expect from him.

  “Was I actually dead?” Ben asked me.

  “That’s a matter of perspective,” I said. “By the standards of your time, you were.”

  “My soul must have stayed with me, then?” Ben asked, trying to come to grips with his own religious background. “Even though I was dead.”

  “Told you!” Epstein said with a grin and a wink.

  Ben shook his head and smiled. Some things never changed.

  “And by the way, Ben, happy birthday,” Epstein added.

  “Happy b-birthday?”

  “I believe you turned 147 today.”

  Ben managed a feeble smile back. “N-No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  That was when Ben Smith felt the final stray piece of himself fall neatly into place.

  May 30, 2073

  —The World Government Medallic Council offers 1000 WCU coins commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Lunar 7 Biosphere, now the moon’s second largest city. The 90% iridium, 10% platinum coins, struck at Am-Can Station in the Sea of Tranquillity, are composed entirely of materials mined at lunar sites, and will carry just a 400 WCU premium over face value (but a 752 WCU premium over metallic content based on today’s market prices). Delivery to Earthbound customers via Inert-fusion Thruster is guaranteed within 72 hours of confirmation. The Professional Numismatists Guild assails the government offering as “crassly commercial, and severely overpriced.”—The World Census Bureau confirms that with the birth of a baby girl to Rajiv and Indira Singh of New Delhi, India, at 11:47:52 Greenwich Standard Time, the Earth’s human population reached 10 billion.

  “It all had very little to do with psychobabble itself,” Carl Epstein was saying to Ben as they rode the pneumatic subway to Anchorage. “Twentieth century education, politics, and especially religion were the real culprits; turned people into sheep, making them susceptible to all that crap.”

  Neither man had ever been to Alaska, America’s largest and most populous state. But they’d seen 3-D and VR presentations of the state’s diverse wonders, its colossal, majestic cities surrounded by virgin wilderness, and today seemed a good day to go. Besides, with the subway’s recent retooling, the excursion from and back to Washington, D.C., now required less than an hour’s travel each way.

  Ben adjusted their wallscreens to appear as windows. Engaging scenery—cities, parks, and occasional wilderness—rushed by at about a hundred miles per hour, 1/48th of their actual speed. Every minute the image would skip ahead to allow the outside AudioVids to catch up.

  “The people who made real contributions to twentieth century civilization,” Epstein continued, “were those who learned how to think for themselves. Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates. Even Warren Buffett and Mohandas Gandhi were in fact men of science. The real difference between religion and science is that science demands testable hypotheses. That’s why it’s the only proper discipline for reinterpreting evolving knowledge. Religion’s random and undisciplined, usually an accident of birth. Humans have devised at least ten thousand contradictory religions over the past few millennia, only one of which, at most, could possibly be entirely right. Since theology’s value’s subjective and unknowable, why bother with it at all?”

  “Why bother with art? Or poetry?” Ben asked, wondering why he felt so much less engaged than he used to in these debates.

  “Because art and poetry do not mislead; they don’t purport to be based in fact. Science smothers deceit, while religion and every other form of mysticism nourishes it. And the human capacity for deceit, especially self-deceit, is bottomless.”

  “Some are more prone to self-deceit than others,” Ben said dispassionately, almost as if by rote, “and much less so today than the days before we were frozen.” Didn’t Carl realize he was tired of talking about this stuff? Hell, he must have. So why did he keep harping on it?

  “Absolutely true. Did you know that nearly twenty-five percent of the worldwide population now admits to atheism?”

  “No kidding?” Ben wished he could think of a way to change the subject. Carl should have been glad to see civilization embracing his own idea of rationality. Why wasn’t he? Because it had all happened without him? Because they didn’t need him anymore? My God, he thought, that must have been it. And now Carl was angry about it!

  “So at least the trend’s headed in the right direction,” Epstein went on. “But we still have a long way to go.”

  Ben’s stomach tightened. Say what one would about religion, it seemed to have done the world a hell of a lot more good than harm. He hated to think what people during previous centuries might have become without religion’s comforts and moral voice. Especially back when death was a certainty.

  * * *

  Within a few weeks of his reviv, Ben had made the mistake of telling Epstein about rising out of his own body, then the tunnel and the light: his near-death experience. “It was terrifying,” Ben had told him. “I thought I might stay conscious for centuries, frozen in time.”

  “Yeah, those early suspensions were crude.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Brain activity doesn’t shut down until the organ’s internal temperature falls below about twenty degrees centigrade. In the meantime, the brain restructures memories, creating all sorts of illusions. They must not have cooled your head fast enough. If you’d been suspended two years later, you never
would’ve had to go through any of that. By 1990, every cryonics technician knew how to administer barbiturates to prevent brain activity from resuming during the CPR phase.”

  Then Epstein had called up a VR presentation for Ben, illustrating the review-pointing mirages responsible for out-of-body experiences, and the exact neuronal phenomena that caused NDEs. He’d insisted that Ben sit through the twenty-eight-minute spectacle.

  Christ, Ben thought, Carl must collect this stuff.

  That was only a slight overstatement. During the seven years since his revivification, Epstein had spent an average of fifty hours per month studying the gradual scientific vindication of “the skeptics” and vilification of “the mystics.”

  “Why didn’t anyone realize,” Carl would pontificate, “that if there were really such a thing as ESP, the Russians would’ve won. the cold war and all the casinos in Las Vegas would’ve gone broke?… The alien abduction delusion had existed throughout recorded history. First it was evil spirits, then witches, then Satan who abducted people. Finally, when Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds hoax implanted the fear of Martians into collective consciousness, it suddenly became flying saucers… Most religious adherents were only one step above suicide cultists; sheep vulnerable to the first available shepherd to lead them to the promised land; oblivious to the earthly bounty already at their feet… Recovered memories? Don’t get me started…”

  But Ben had come to realize that, ironically, Epstein’s moralizing had another source: the man’s own subliminal mind. Throughout his entire life he’d lived alone, and preferred it that way. Ben figured that his friend subconsciously resented any intrusion into his space, and some part of Epstein was trying to drive him away.

  “You know, Carl,” he said, “I can afford my own place. Just let me know when you’ve had enough of me, okay?”

  This sudden change of topic caught Epstein’s attention. He seemed to choose his words with discretion, so as not to trigger the Truth Machine encircling Ben’s left index finger, perhaps. “You saved my life, Ben. I owe you.”

  “Well, now we’re even.”

  “When I revived you, I’d planned on three to six years. It’s only been sixteen months.”

  “Sixteen and a half.”

  “Actually, sixteen months and eighteen days,” Epstein said, smiling.

  Ben had come to think of Epstein and himself almost as an old married couple, who often irritated one another, but had been forced by mutual need for the companionship and rapport of shared history, to tolerate—even cherish—their relationship. Besides, in a way, they truly loved each other.

  Marge was gone forever. Ben’s children and grandchildren were all suspended or dead. His great- and great-great-grandchildren would call or visit occasionally, but other than Alica and me, he had little regular contact with us.

  In 1988, the year of Ben’s suspension, living below the poverty line had often meant inhabiting the streets, struggling for necessities. Now it meant two-year-old AI chips and “basic” self-cleaning clothes with less sophisticated temperature control. It meant a fifteen- or sixteen-hour work week, not because one wanted to work—as most still did; even many who could afford not to—but because one needed a salary to afford travel to interesting places or to impress friends or potential sex partners.

  It was the youngest who seemed to find the most to complain about. They became jealous of other people’s intelligence, wealth, fame, or spouses. In essence, the greatest resentments were directed at others’ happiness relative to their own, a truism of the human condition throughout history. People also bemoaned the fact that some had become less conversational, less literate, more dependent on machines and AIs. And many believed that civilization itself was deteriorating. But like Epstein, Ben remembered what the twentieth century had been like, and remembering was very different from watching low-definition movies or reading about it on a screen.

  How could people actually believe that things were getting worse? he now wondered. Same way they always had, he guessed.

  Ben often tried to weave instructive analogies that might help others glimpse the wonders they were overlooking—or seeing through. The best he could do was imagine what it might have been like for a twentieth century man sucked into some bizarre space/time continuum, landing in the year 1250. There, the “middle class” hoed dirt, lived in hovels, scratched lice, lost half their children to disease, and considered a person “old” at thirty-five. To Ben, the year 2073 related to 1988 almost as the year 1988 did to 1250. The analogy worked fine for him; he had a frame of reference for it. They didn’t.

  What Ben Smith could not ignore was that even the poorest among them lived like kings and looked like gods.

  Ben knew that the first year after his reanimation had been difficult for Epstein, upon whom he’d been totally dependent, not financially, but emotionally.

  The leisure class now comprised nearly a fourth of the world’s population. Rare was the person who’d worked fifty years or longer who could not support him/herself on income earned from savings and investments. Most members of the so-called involuntary work force had been born after 2010.

  During Ben’s hibernation, the Smith Family Cryonic Trust had first been looted, then fractionally restored. Through compound interest, it had grown to a respectable 1,462,588 World Currency Units, nearly double the value of Epstein’s surviving trust, and more than enough to maintain Ben in eternal comfort—assuming he had no one else to support.

  But Ben, who’d never preferred to live alone, had always assumed, wrongly, that Epstein possessed the same need for companionship. At last he recognized his mistake.

  Anchorage had been fascinating and, so long as Epstein kept his mouth shut, relaxing. Since weather control had been installed in urban areas there only thirteen years ago, almost all the construction was brand new; state-of-the-art. Alaska was now home for 79 million humans, nearly 0.8 percent of the world’s population, yet it seemed uncrowded somehow, even at 4.79 people per acre. Although the state had become a magnet for new colonizers, the efficiencies of its ultramodern structures allowed plenty of room for public lands.

  On their return trip, Ben broached the subject Epstein had been avoiding. “Carl,” he said, “I’ve just made a decision to—”

  “Wait,” Epstein interrupted, “I didn’t mean what I said before. At least not the way it sounded. I’m a loner by nature, but it’s awfully nice to have someone my own age to hang out with. Hardly anyone from our generation believed reanimation was possible.”

  “I know. It’s sad.” Ben thought of Marge. Dust by now. He wanted to cry.

  “Yeah. There aren’t too many of us around.”

  “Hey, it’s not like we’d never see each other,” Ben said. “I’ll probably move back to the Boston area, maybe Somerville or Dorchester. We’d still be neighbors—only a few minutes apart—and I’ll always be grateful you guided me through this transition; made me feel secure and comfortable. It’s just that this existence is starting to become a little too, well, easy for me. I could see myself traveling around the world, or debating theology with you, or even spending days at a time in the VR pod. But I need a real life, a way to contribute. I can’t just live for hedonistic pleasure.”

  “Don’t knock it.”

  “But I need more. Besides, I’ve got four children, four grandchildren, my mother, and a best friend still in suspension.” “They won’t know the difference between being revived in ten years or fifty. The AIs are projecting that by 2120, nanotech will be so cheap, it’ll cost less to revive people than to store them. Their transition into the modern world will be easier by then, too.”

  “I know all the arguments, Carl, but I’ll know the difference. Besides, if we don’t figure out how to motivate people pretty damn soon, the human race is gonna have a big problem. People have to accomplish rewarding work; we need to achieve things with our lives.”

  “How can people achieve things,” Epstein posited, “when machines are smarter, faster
, stronger, and more talented than we are?”

  “Machines don’t care, and people need to be cared about. Machines can only do what we tell them to; it’s still up to us to decide what we want. Only the living can achieve satisfaction from accomplishment. That’s why swimmers are still setting records, 150 years after submarines were built. Artists still paint, two and a half centuries after the invention of the camera. And novelists still write books, even though they have to compete with 55t parallel internal memory chips.”

  “Brave souls, they. Why not simply relax and enjoy the ride?”

  “Because I refuse to be part of the problem.”

  January 14, 2075

  —After less than a century of existence, the Extropy Institute attains membership of one billion, making it the second largest religious or philosophical organization in the world. Founded as an educational corporation in California during the early 1980s, the Institute propounds a philosophy of immortalism, self-transformation, atheism, and spontaneous order through evolution, technology, and institutional intelligence.—Studying a brain cloned from skin cells of ATI Chairman Randall Petersen Armstrong, researchers at Amgen LaRoche isolate a nerve-impulse enzyme that allows perfect access to all neuronal memories. Within two weeks the World Drug Administration expects to decide if the drug, Mnemex, which could grant every human virtually total recall, should be approved for general use.

  The fifty-six celebrants filled all three rooms but did not overcrowd them. A lovely party, Ben thought. Yes, lovely was the word.

  He’d gotten used to the fact that every female he met was attractive, and often available. At first he’d been astounded by how relaxed sex had become during the eighty-three years he was on ice. But it made sense. Every adult was at sexual peak, and consistently desirable. Furthermore, without the danger of deceitful infidelity, disease, or unwanted pregnancy, societal attitudes had rendered jealousy less of a roadblock. Sex was now mainly a source of joy and pleasure, perhaps an expression of friendship or affection.